What you need to know
- Steam Families is a new feature allowing Steam players to share games with members of their household.
- Steam Families pool the libraries of each user together, allowing each family member to play a game if there's a copy of it in the collected library.
- Up to six players can be part of a Steam Family, with Child and Adult accounts that allow the latter to set limitations like parental controls on the former.
- Steam Families is now out of beta testing and is available for everyone to use.
It's time to share the means of recreation across your household.
Steam Families is out of beta testing, with Valve originally announcing the feature a few months ago and gathering feedback from testers. Steam Families allows players to create their own digital family of up to six Steam users, pooling everyone's libraries of games together.
As an example of how it all works, if two players in a Steam Family own a copy of Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment's Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, then any two players in the family can play that game at the same time, but the other members of the family will have to wait until they stop playing. If another member of the family buys a copy, then up to three players can play it at the same time, and so on.
You can check out this video from Valve below, which gives some more general details on Steam Families:
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Analysis: A potentially-transformative addition
Like I wrote when Steam Families was first announced, this feature isn't one that I'll get a lot of use from at this stage of my life. Anyone with a partner and kids should be ecstatic about this, as it means sharing games across the household just got far easier. That's especially true with the rise of the Steam Deck, meaning someone could be playing games while on the couch if someone else is using a household's main Windows PC.
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The feature set like approving purchases and setting parental controls on the types of games that are played seem to address any possible potential concerns around younger children having access to an adult's game library.
Valve does note in the announcement that the number of users in a Steam Family might be adjusted in the future, so we'll have to wait and see if the limit grows beyond six or is reduced below it as time goes on.
